Thursday, July 24, 2014

Development 101

One of the most important things in any complex application is enabling the user to find things that are relevant and important to them. Its development 101.

I was playing with the industrial changes and explored the teams interface. I figured out the difference between teams already at work and teams up for auction, saw how to bid on them (not a fan that you *have* to hit enter after typing a solar system name, but not a big deal), and decided to throw a bid on a team as an experiment.

Note: not pleased the bid had to come out of my alt's personal wallet instead of a corporate wallet, but again not a big deal.

I log off and logged back on the next day and decided to check out that bid I made.

And I would if I can find it. 

I don't know if the auction finished and I was outbid or if its still running. I simply cannot find it as I did not explicitly write down the team name as I made the bid. That's crap, CCP, that is unacceptable. It should be simple as a check box to see the teams I've made a bid on, or at least that have a bid from my system / a specified system. This is a big deal.

Seriously, can you tell which one I've bid on?
The interface knows my bids because if I hover over the right one in the auction column it tells me my bid amount! It should be obvious at a glance which one it is, and ideally if my system I bid for is the current winning bid or not.

(And no, I do not think this is a good spot for the API and a third party developer to step in. This is a good spot for CCP to develop a new feature properly. Their QA department should have caught this.)

On a positive note, I'm pleased with how many active teams there are and how easy it is to browse for the ones that impact a certain blueprint. Still need time to tell how feasible it is to get a team I want though.

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In other news, the first of two pre-Crius Archon builds comes out in two days, so after I get back from a long weekend family trip I'll evaluate what changes to my Archon build there will be. Look for that post Monday.

1 comment:

  1. You should make the suggestion to CCP, that seems like an easy fix to make. I'm surprised it isn't already like that, weird.

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